For Ashwin Ram, Dr Google is just a step on the path to future healthcare.

Ashwin is the Chief Innovation Officer for Augmented Social Cognition at PARC, in Silicon Valley.

Augmented social cognition is the idea that social and mobile technologies can be designed in a way that augments human cognition—that is, makes us smarter. And PARC is a good place to try to implement this type of design.

PARC stands for Palo Alto Research Centre; an R&D think-tank with a commercial focus, and an esteemed history. Until a few years ago it was known as Xerox PARC, and has a reputation for being home to some of the greatest technological innovations of the past thirty years. It’s most famously the birthplace of the personal computer.

Transcript

Joel Werner: Do you ever go online to search for symptoms that you're experiencing? I do it all the time, and it's a trend that has picked up the nickname 'Dr Google'. For Ashwin Ram, Dr Google is just one step on the path to future healthcare. Ashwin is the chief innovation officer for Augmented Social Cognition at PARC in Silicon Valley. PARC stands for Palo Alto Research Centre. It's perhaps most famously the birthplace of the personal computer. So no big deal, right?

Ashwin was recently in Sydney for the Amplify Festival, and I started by asking him if they had this concept of Dr Google in the US.

Ashwin Ram: Yes, we do have the same saying, 'Dr Google'. What's interesting though is in the last couple of years Dr Google is starting to be replaced with…you might think of it as Dr Facebook. 96% of people now go to Facebook for health information.

Joel Werner: That's a scary thought.

Ashwin Ram: It's a scary thought. But one of the driving principles behind our research is that we have to engage with people the way they are engaging with the world. People are going to social media, it's not just Facebook. There are social networking sites for different disease conditions, like diabetes and breast cancer and others. There are mobile devices. And so people are doing that, like it or not. And part of the reason is that there is so much information on Google and a lot of it is good information and a lot of it is not. People don't want a barrage of information, they want to engage with people they trust who can then help them understand the information, make it actionable for them, and help them actually incorporate that information into their daily lives.

Joel Werner: So is it this shift towards social media that we are seeing in all pockets of the internet? If people move from Dr Google to Dr Facebook but Dr Facebook being asking your friend if they've ever had a similar symptom as opposed to just typing it into Google and pressing 'I feel lucky'.

Ashwin Ram: Yes, so we're seeing that same kind of trend in pretty much every aspect of business, and healthcare is of course moving in the same direction. We're seeing it in education, we're seeing it in finance. So people are starting to move to social media because they want information from people they can trust. Again, it's not necessarily just Facebook, there are some very well-known sites like PatientsLikeMe where people start to connect with and get information from sometimes total strangers. But there are people who are like them, there are people who understand the conditions, who've been there, in their shoes and can help, again, make sense of their conditions. I don't think people want to go to social media in exclusion of their doctors but they want their doctors and their nurses and their experts to be part of that conversation as well.

Joel Werner: So we've gone from Dr Google to Dr Facebook, but I imagine that part of your job is thinking about where we're going to go next.

Ashwin Ram: I think the next big thing that is coming is, if you will, Dr iPhone. I was at TedMed recently and they had a very interesting exhibit called the Smartphone Physical. So you take your iPhone and you can give yourself a physical, you can measure different types of vital signs, connect up different kinds of devices. You can give yourself an ultrasound, and it's all done through your phone. Now you start to connect that with…I'm not particularly fond of the buzzword but the buzzword is 'big data', you start to connect that with lots of data from lots of people doing similar things, and using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms you can start to mine the data and start to make sense of your symptoms or your conditions or your concerns in a very real-time contextual manner. So, moving away from the web as we know it almost completely.

Joel Werner: So tell us where your work fits in. You're designing an app?

Ashwin Ram: Yes, so we are big believers in contextual information, information that's in your hand, delivered to you in the context of your activity, you don't have to go to your computer to get it, it's always with you. The problem we are addressing is the problem of wellness. The Centres for Disease Control in the US reports that 50% of factors related to personal health are due to lifestyle. These are choices we make about our diet and exercise and other things that have a huge impact on our health. So, for example, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, both of which are so-called lifestyle diseases, they are responsible for three of the five biggest chronic problems that kill people every year. And so our idea is to use the power of social media and mobile technologies to start to nudge people towards healthier lifestyles.

The good news is that a very large number of people are actively trying to change their lifestyles to prevent a major chronic illness, not manage, prevent a major chronic illness. They are aware of the issue, they need help. And so the way we are going to help them is to rely on the power of their social network, a small set of trusted people, they could be family, they could be friends, they could even be strangers, but who team up into these small teams with a social commitment to each other to keep themselves on track and start to make a difference to their own behaviours.

We couple that with some advanced psychology and modelling technologies to start to build these user models, if you will, of each individual, try to get an idea of their goals, their preferences, their likes, their dislikes, their attitudes. And we can do that by understanding and analysing their behaviour through algorithms. Using that, we then provide them with coaching interventions along with the team support to help them achieve their goals.

So all of that sounds complicated. From a user perspective it's actually very simple. You download the app, you either join a team or you form a team with your friends or colleagues or family members, and then you decide what wellness challenge you want to engage in; for the next eight weeks I'm going to do the following thing. So there's kind of a marketplace of wellness challenges, you pick one, and your team then starts to work on it together. So that's it, you just say for the next eight weeks I'm going to do the following thing and we all do it together, at the end of that we then move on to something new.

Joel Werner: Is this app available now? Has it been rolled out already?

Ashwin Ram: The app is not yet available to the public, it is in pilot right now. We're getting very good engagement and very good results. The biggest problem with wellness programs is that we never finish. We sign up for a diet, three and a half weeks later, on average, we are done dieting, we are back to our old ways. In January we make a New Year's resolution to join the gym, by February the gym membership is unused. So we really focus the app on a highly engaging and sticky experience, so that when you do signup for a wellness challenge you're likely to complete it successfully. We are piloting it right now with an internal group of people, getting very, very good outcomes with respect to stickiness and engagement with the app. We hope to release it publicly later this year.

Joel Werner: Intuitively it makes a lot of sense. There's been a real boom in popularity of boot camps in Australia, these early morning collections of people who may or may not have known each other before who come together before work and all go through boot camp exercise. And I guess the idea is that it's some sort of positive peer pressure system. So where you might skip the morning jog if you're going by yourself, you're less likely to skip going and exercising if there's a group of people that you might let down. It's this kind of concept that will work for the app.

Ashwin Ram: It is the boot camp concept. It works for Weight Watchers, you show up on Monday morning and weigh in with a group of people. Alcoholics Anonymous. The power of the app is that this kind of boot camp now can be in the palm of your hands 24/7 around the world. So I'm here on travel in Australia, I don't have access to my boot camp back in Palo Alto, California, but my boot camp is with me, it's my team on my app.

Joel Werner: Dr Ashwin Ram. From Dr Google through Dr Facebook and on to Dr iPhone. If you'd like to sign up to road-test Ashwin's app when it's released later this year, follow the link on the Health Report website. Just go to abc.net.au/radionational and select Health Report from the program list. You can always subscribe to the podcast to make sure you never miss an episode, or come say hi on Twitter, I'm @joelwerner. I'd love to hear what you thought about today's show. But that's all we have time for this week. Until next time, bye for now.